An Unexpected Pleasant Find - Wheels Across The Prairie

First, sorry to hear of your father-in-law's illness.  A sad thing to deal with.

Very interesting CNW motor car.  

The stack & cowcatcher on that switcher are definitely not original equipment.  Someone added that on to make it look (sort of) like a 19th century wood burner.

John

Is that... Asbestos on the back covering inside the Cab?

It is fantastic to discover these little, often very interesting, museums across the

country.  I blundered on a Lima Berkshire and a Shay in city parks, that I had never

heard of.  I wish there was a guide of these that have a railroad theme.  I'd buy one...

John I would tend to agree about the stack and the cowcatcher except in the depot they have a lot of old photos and paintings on the walls. One is of this engine under steam pulling an old type of passenger car(heavyweight?), 2 wooden box cars and a caboose, and it has the bell stack and cowcatcher the same as now. Maybe C&NW modified the 0-6-0 for use out on the prairie. I took a picture of the painting that didn't come out too good but am attaching it. When I cleaned it up best as I could and zoom in you can see it definitely has that type of stack, the headlight in the picture on the wall is different then what's on it now.

Do u happen to take pic of C&NW caboose?

Sorry only of the interior.

If that is a PAINTING of the 0-6-0 out on the prairie, artistic license can well have

applied, and the painting is a creation of imagination.  A PHOTO would have documented it.

The 0-6-0 is in fact a Soo Line B4 class of 1923 if memmory serve me correctly.

I had my father-in-law of 87 years passing this past week. He taugh me a great deal as he was an industrial electrian all his life. God bless them!

It may have been used on some long defunct tourist line and had the stack and cowcatcher added then.  This was a regrettably common practice in the 1960's.

I'll go with Soo Nut's ID of the engine, and the Soo did not use that kind of stack and cowcatcher, especially on a switcher.

Still, It was nice to find some interesting trains to take your mind off the sad things in life for a little while. 

That section car really interests me, I wonder who made it, as I haven't seen one like it before.

John

Another Soo fan

That does look like a photo, but I think that was a tourist line or movie train from the 60's.

John

It is a photo and the information on the engine posted in the Depot there states the engine was built in 1905 for the C&NW, it also stated where it had operated, but I don't recall what towns it serviced. It didn't mention anything about the SOO Line I do know that. It was a nice smaller museum, and in a town the size of Tracy, MN, a real surprise. I leave it to y'all "experts" to hash out what is correct on it or not. I just thought y'all would enjoy the pics.

It's not the same locomotive in the painting/photograph nor is the stack the same. The stack is MUCH smaller, there's only one sand dome, the headlight and the tender are different and I suspect the pilot's not really visible.

The desecrated locomotive's (No. 9 or 850, take your pick, depending on where you look) pilot has no provision for a coupler, the stack looks like (and probably is) an old cyclone dust collector and wouldn't fit any railroad's clearance. 

The stack's a pure fantasy or nightmare, depending on your point of view.  Nothing a good Sawzall wouldn't cure.

Rusty

And thank you Paul for sharing!  I want one of those speeders.

John